Scores of South Koreans marched in front of memorials erected in honor of the victims of the Halloween stampede in Seoul, whose death toll stands at 154, on Monday, as criticism flares against the authorities accused of laxity in maintaining order and control of the crowd on the evening of the tragedy.
In the morning, President Yoon Suk-yeol and his wife Kim Keon-hee each laid a white flower in front of a huge black altar erected in central Seoul in honor of the victims of the disaster on Saturday evening. The public was then allowed to march in front of the monument to pay their respects, often in tears.
“I am devastated,” Hwang Gyu-hyeon, a 19-year-old student, told AFP. “I pray for the victims. I can’t believe this accident happened despite the signs that were clear beforehand. Nothing was done to prepare for this crowd,” she criticized.
In the Itaewon district, where the fatal crowd movement occurred, passers-by stopped to pray and lay flowers and bottles of alcohol as offerings in front of another memorial, improvised in front of a metro station.
The police announced on Monday that they had set up an investigation team which viewed the videos of the surveillance cameras of the surrounding businesses and questioned dozens of witnesses, in order to determine the exact cause of the tragedy.
But on the Internet and in the press, criticism fused Monday against the authorities, accused of lack of anticipation.
About 100,000 people, mostly in their twenties and dressed up for Halloween, had converged on Saturday on Itaewon, a district of bars and nightclubs made up of a maze of steeply sloping narrow lanes along a main avenue. Witnesses described a total absence of measures aimed at channeling or controlling this huge crowd.
Police acknowledged on Monday that they only deployed 137 officers to Itaewon on Saturday evening, while stressing that this figure was higher than those for Halloween parties in previous years.
Local media pointed out that most of these police were there to prevent drug use, not to channel the party crowd.
“Police officers at the scene did not detect a sudden increase in the crowd,” South Korea’s national police law enforcement bureau chief Hong Ki- told Yonhap news agency. hyun.
“It’s a disaster that could have been controlled or prevented,” Lee Young-ju, a professor from Seoul University’s fire and disaster department, told YTN. “But nobody cared about it, and above all nobody took responsibility,” he lamented.
The police criticized
On social media, many users accused the police of completely failing to control the crowd, leaving too many people to crowd around Itaewon subway station and in the alleys where the deadly stampede occurred.
“I’ve been living in Itaewon for ten years and have seen Halloween parties every year, but yesterday’s one drew way more people than the previous ones,” said Twitter user @isakchoi312, also pointing to the absence of any control measure.
The South Korean government has denied any laxity. The stampede “was not a problem that could have been solved by deploying police or firefighters in advance,” Interior Minister Lee Sang-min said at a press briefing on Sunday.
The South Korean police are however masters in crowd control, in a country where the numerous and frequent demonstrations are often supervised by a number of agents greater than that of the participants.
But the organizers of political or trade union demonstrations are required to declare their plans to the authorities in advance, which was not the case for the young people who came to participate in large numbers and in disorder at the Halloween party in Itaewon.
“The current system lacks the legal and institutional foundations for the police to control the general public,” an official from the presidential office said during a briefing.
Witnesses described scenes of chaos and horror in the sloping alleyway just three meters wide, where thousands of revelers began pushing each other, falling on top of each other, choking and panicking , without any police presence.
The disaster left 154 dead, including 26 foreigners, according to the latest official report which could still increase, at least 33 injured people being in critical condition.